UpFront

LJ Index—August 2003

1. Linux percentage range of new server operating system shipments in
late 2002: 15–20

2. Percentage share of new OS shipments that will be Linux on Intel,
or Lintel, by 2006 or 2007: 45

3. Current percentage rate of increase in base IT salaries: 5

4. Number of Linux servers that will replace SCO UNIX at branches of
the Farmlands rural retail cooperative in New Zealand: 28

5. Number of farmers served by Farmlands: 15,000

6. Number of Linux server shipments to Asia-Pacific in 2002: 18,000

7. Sales in millions of US dollars for those servers: 58

8. Projected number of Linux server shipments to Asia-Pacific in
2007: 47,000

9. Sales in millions for those servers: 146

10. Minimum top number of computing nodes that will run Linux on IBM's
new Blue Gene system: 65,000

11. Number of CPUs in a single Blue Gene chip: 32

12. Number of 32-CPU chips in a single Blue Gene computing node: 64

13. Number of nodes per Blue Gene rack: 8

14. Number of racks required to obtain a petaflop (quadrillion
floating-point math operations per second): 64

15. Size in millions of dollars earmarked for the Blue Gene research
initiative, announced in 2000: 100

1–3: Meta Group, Inc.

4, 5: New Zealand Herald

6–9: Gartner Group

10–15: CNet

Bartleby:

Three years ago I reviewed several good programs I still use today,
such as arping, SendEmail, SICKnotes and CIDR. But the most uniquely
useful one is Bartleby. What I like best about Bartleby is
its flexibility and usefulness for all kinds of things not foreseen by
the author. As I get older, my mind doesn't remember like it used to.
But I can remember to send off a quick note, check it later and act
on it. It's as simple as bartleby "start writing linux web
book". Yes, the script bartleby is mine and saves me writing
echo "message" | syslog@localhost, but that's
small peanuts. If you try this and get in the habit of using it,
you'll see how valuable it is. Requires: Perl, Perl modules DBI,
CGI, DBD::Mysql or DBD::Pg, MySQL or Postgres database, MTA, Web server,
Web browser.

Helpdesk:

This Web help desk allows various levels of users, from clients to
support personnel to site contacts to administrators, to track trouble
tickets. The system is easy to set up and use. Each user can configure their
preferences as needed. If e-mail support is desired, you'll need an
MTA, such as sendmail, running on the system. Requires: Web server with PHP
and PostgreSQL support, PostgreSQL server, Web browser.

New Sputnik Access Point Achieves Orbit

You've got an enterprise. Your enterprise has a network. You want to go
wireless, but you want to manage the unwired parts of your network as
well as you manage the wired parts—maybe even better.
An inexpensive answer comes in the form of Sputnik's new AP 120, an
intelligent wireless access point (WAP) that lets you know who is on
your wireless network and how much they're using it, through Sputnik
Central Control software.

Sputnik's New AP 120

Central Control Screenshot

Sputnik, by the way, is the company started last year by David LaDuke,
David Sifry and Arthur Tyde—the same guys who founded Linuxcare.
Both the AP 120 and Sputnik Central Control software run on Linux and
are available through the Sputnik site and OEM channels.

cdwrite:

Got X? No? But there's too much to remember to burn a CD on that
VT-only server with the brand new high-performance CD burner?
Miss your xcdroast, gcombust, k3b, whatever? Try cdwrite. It
takes the pain out of creating a data image and writing it or reading
and writing audio tracks. If you have the tools installed, you don't
have to keep re-reading the man pages simply to burn an image.
Requires: bash, cdparanoia, cdrdao, mkisofs, cdrecord.

Inventory:

It slices. It dices. You can sort it, search it, export it or import it.
You create the categories and subcategories, then create the
columns as any of Boolean, Integer or String. In fact, this looks like
a nice utility to use for any number of applications, not only for
inventory, but how you abuse it is strictly up to you. I doubt anyone will
say anything if you used it as a to-do list or address book. Few things
beyond pencil and paper are this flexible, and almost none are as powerful.
Requires: libgtk-x11, libgdk-x11, libatk, libgdk_pixbuf, libm,
libpangoxft, libpangox, libpango, libgobject, libgmodule, libdl, libglib,
libmysqlclient, glibc, libXi, libXext, libXft, libX11, libz, libXrender,
libfontconfig, libfreetype, libcrypt, libnsl, libexpat.

tvlisting:

Want to know what's on the tube tonight? This simple Perl program
shows you in any of a number of formats, although HTML is probably the
easiest to read (and is the default). So, if you have free time coming up
soon, you can check out the movie listings ahead of time.
I think I'll check for the next episode of FarScape. Requires: Perl,
Perl Modules HTML::TreeBuilder, HTML::Tagset, HTML::Parser, Web browser.

diff -u: What's New in Kernel Development

Interrupt request handlers have changed
their return values in the 2.5 tree to
handle certain error conditions involving
peripheral devices better. One result of this is that
many, many drivers were broken at the source level
and had to be fixed. For drivers included in the
official kernel source, this was a repetitive,
undesirable chore, but still feasible. Countless
external drivers, however, can be fixed only when
someone notices they no longer work; although
proprietary drivers may take much longer than
that. This is par for the course of the kernel
development cycle, though such a large change is
never undertaken lightly.

Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz is officially at
the top of IDE maintainership. Andre
Hedrick has (for the moment at least) stepped
aside to focus on Serial ATA (SATA) and vendor
chipset issues. Alan Cox remains the official
liaison to Linus for all IDE patches.
Andre also has
decided to release all his
kernel contributions retroactively under a dual license, instead
of under only the GNU General Public
License. The
second license is now Lawrence E. Rosen's Open
Software License.

Benjamin Herrenschmidt forked the
RADEON
Framebuffer code, when Ani Joshi, the official
maintainer, failed to apply patches or respond
to e-mails. With Ani's disappearance, Benjamin
collected a variety of patches that had
been floating around and released a new RadeonFB
update. As of early May 2003, this driver still needs
a lot of work; Benjamin's plan is to continue
working with the current code base for 2.4 and
try to get a complete rewrite into the 2.5 tree
in spite of the feature-freeze. Some developers,
like Alan Cox, have said the feature-freeze is
not really in effect anymore. If so, the first
attempt to stabilize 2.5 in preparation for 2.6
(or 3.0) has been a failure.

I/O Controls (ioctls) have been on the way
out ever since SysFS
emerged out of the 2.5 planning discussions. In the old days,
folks used to rail against ioctl functions in kernel drivers. Not only were
there hordes and hordes of them, but it was impossible to know exactly how
many there were, and it was therefore impossible to document all of them
properly.
Although there are still plenty to get rid of, more and more are
migrating to the saner SysFS interface. And, some that have never been used
at all, like SCSI_IOCTL_BENCHMARK_COMMAND and SCSI_IOCTL_SYNC, are being
removed as part of that general cleanup. It looks as though SysFS soon
will become the primary interface between userland and the kernel, replacing
ioctls and the unruly ProcFS.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has been working on a
replacement for devfs (and /dev) since
early 2003 and finally released an initial
version of udev in mid-April, based on
designs and ideas by Dan Stekloff. The
/dev directory always has been a mess, typically
including hundreds and hundreds of unnecessary
files. Although udev is only one among a crowd of
possible replacements, including devfs itself,
it seems clear that this area of the kernel will
be undergoing extensive modifications in the 2.5
time frame and the next unstable series.

iBackup:

This particular backup utility isn't meant to back up your system,
rather it backs up configuration files. It creates an HTML file with
all the data in it, tars it up and compresses it if requested.
iBackup also can upload this file to another system for safekeeping.
This makes saving and restoring critical data (like your password,
group and shadow files, BIND files, etc.) quick and easy. Requires:
BASH, tar, gzip, ifconfig, netstat, standard UNIX tools.

They Said It

Obviously Linux owes its heritage to UNIX, but not its code. We would not,
nor will not, make such a claim.

The only question I asked was “My business uses Linux exclusively. Can
you guarantee that Centrino will work with the computers we
use?”—and
got an affirmative, in front of around ten UK tech industry journalists.
Just thought you would like to know.

—Peter Spark, CEO and Founder, Ecsponet, reporting from an Intel
briefing in the UK

Again, I don't understand why you all are so threatened by this, but
from a careful look at the lobbyists in this room that are representing
Microsoft, and all of you here representing proprietary software
companies, which—let's face it, that's where the big money is, it's
not in Open Source, it's in proprietary—it's rather transparent as to
why you all feel so threatened by this language. And I'll tell you, this
[bill] is innocuous, but next session I'll be on a crusade.

—Texas State
Senator John Corona (D-Dallas) to Mario Correa, who represented the
Business Software Alliance in opposition to a bill introduced by Corona
that would allow Texas to consider acquisition of open source as well as
proprietary software

We have all seen many movies like Hackers that
pass off ridiculous 3-D animated eye-candy scenes
as hacking. So I was shocked to find that Trinity
does it properly in The Matrix Reloaded. She
whips out Nmap version 2.54BETA25, uses it to
find a vulnerable SSH server, and then proceeds to
exploit it using the SSH1 CRC32 exploit from 2001.

jigl:

This Perl script is simply too easy. You create a directory, copy
all the files you want to show on a web page into it, then run
jigl.pl from inside that directory. This gives you
instant thumbnails, web pages for each thumbnail, and you can look
through the slides one by one. You can customize using
various templates that aren't difficult to manage.
Requires: Perl, ImageMagick, jhead.